Billy House

The lawmakers and other personalities I cover in the nation’s capital and previously in Albany have not always appreciated my chronicling of their activities – or at times their lack of activity or influence. And that is probably a good thing.

As one of Newsday’s two Washington-based reporters since August 2025, my aim is neither to please nor treat elected and other public officials unfairly. Rather, it’s to give readers factual and clear pictures of why and how people and events in Congress, federal agencies, courts and campaigns are important to Long Island, if they are.

My aim is to give readers factual and clear pictures of why and how people and events in Congress, federal agencies, courts and campaigns are important to Long Island.

That sounds preachy. I know. But I’ve been a news reporter since I was 18 (after a remarkable run as a newspaper copy boy). I’ve worked reporting jobs that covered areas from Niagara Falls to Montauk, and for outlets based in other states. The upshot: I don’t think I was meant to do anything else.

Early inspiration came from a book I discovered in high school, “The Boys on the Bus,” by Timothy Crouse, published in 1973. It offered a look back at a group of reporters as they covered the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential campaigns, critically and irreverently, sometimes admiringly, but all of it fascinating, at least to me. I was hooked.

Just two days after college graduation, I was “locked ‘n’ loaded” to start a full-time police reporter gig in Niagara Falls, up from where I’d interned the summer before in Buffalo. I eventually moved to write locally for other New York state papers, including one in Poughkeepsie.

It was at that job in Dutchess County, while making routine police calls, that a source tipped me to a teen-aged girl found alive but disoriented in a plastic bag. Few other details were available. I had no idea then I would spend my entire next year as part of a team covering the claims by Al Sharpton and others that Tawana Brawley was racially assaulted, in what would become a national media circus. Newsday was among newspapers that dispatched its own investigative team upstate.

I afterward landed a job in Albany covering state politics and the Legislature in a three-person bureau for what was then a statewide group of Gannett newspapers. During those years, a little-known Republican mayor I had previously covered was elected governor, with lots of help from then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato.

The same chain later sent me to DC to cover New York’s congressional delegation and federal agencies, and I also managed to earn a law degree. I’ve since worked as a one-person DC bureau for papers in Tampa and Phoenix, and elsewhere. In my most recent job prior to Newsday, I reported for Bloomberg from inside the besieged House chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, covered both of President Donald Trump’s impeachments, and occasionally wrote campaign stories from the trail.

But’s it’s a more local or regional reporting focus that helped me break a story that drew national and even international attention – that Arizona Cardinal-turned-soldier Patrick Tillman was killed by friendly fire, despite the Pentagon’s earlier depictions of his death in Afghanistan. My daily coverage then of Arizona-related lawmakers and staffers was the key.

Today, I’m excited to be working the regional DC beat for Newsday. As an aside, remember the book “Boys on the Bus” that I read in high school? One of them is a rival now in my Rotisserie (Roto) baseball league.